Peter Baker’s Planes Grapples With The Disappearance Of Private Life And Cultural Identity During The War On Terror
Baker’s debut novel (2022), set at the turn of the century, is interested in the personal as political. The story centers two couples – Art and Mel, two white collar professionals living in North Carolina, and Amira and Ayoub, a Muslim couple who met in Rome.
Loneliness plagues the protagonists from the outset, but in distinctive ways. Amira hasn’t seen her husband in two years, Ayoub having been illegally detained in a Moroccan prison by western counterterrorism agents during a trip to Pakistan. Early in their marriage, Amira converted to Islam to feel spiritually closer to Ayoub, an Arab immigrant - a decision met with xenophobia and malice by fellow Italians. When he is in prison, she has few friends to turn to in Rome, and feels publicly shamed. Less dramatically but with equal measure, Mel feels out of place in her own community. As a young woman, Mel was very politically active, organizing and attending sit-ins, protests, and boycotts, inspired by a vibrant activist community in the college town of Durham, North Carolina. When she and Art move to Springwater, a community known to them for its recent KKK rallies, she feels like she’s lost any semblance of angst or vigor. Unable to manage financially with store clerk gigs, she becomes a real estate agent, what she considers the ultimate signifier of a run-of-the-mill suburbanite. She has submitted her life to a (lack of) idealism she despises.
The two women seek consolation and support from unlikely male companions. Amira reconnects with Paolo, the Italian man to which she lost her virginity, taking long walks with him and sharing her experiences as a recent convert to Islam. Mel begins an affair with Bradley Welk, a local lawyer and conservative adversary on the school board. Both men are described in rather uninteresting tones, for good reason; rather than adopt these relationships to acclimate to their new circumstances and embrace some of the ideologies of Paolo and Bradley, such interactions are reactive in nature. Both Amira and Mel find opportunity in these encounters to enunciate their “otherness,” from these men, who represent the respective status quo in both Rome and Springwater. They are quiet, secret acts of rebellion, an opportunity for each woman to once again re-delineate themselves against what they feel is a conventional landscape in conflict with their beliefs. Simultaneously, such flirtations with normalcy allow for some level of escapism from the difficulties caused by their feelings of ostracism. They are able to, for these moments, exist peacefully somewhere between conformity and exclusion begetting isolation.
Their private existences quickly cross into very public controversies. Ayoub is released from prison – an event that begs for the larger community to be both nosy and inquisitive about his experiences and culpability. He struggles to re-acclimate to civilian life and rediscover his intimacy with Amira, which is apparent to their family and friends, who quietly suggest to Amira that she leave Ayoub and begin life anew. Similarly, Mel finds out from her longtime activist friends that Springwater is host to a CIA shell airline company that flies suspected terrorists to undisclosed prisons, where they are tortured for information. Bradley is involved in said shell company and its nefarious, hidden purposes, leaving many in the Springwater community to direct a line of questioning to Mel, whom everyone knows has a professional relationship with Bradley because they worked together on a school board budget compromise. Both Amira and Mel are prodded: how could you stay involved with such a person? Both grapple with the answer.
Obviously, this is the through line connecting Amira and Mel’s fates – how do the actions of the American government dictate the lives of not only its own citizenry, but also global citizens writ-large? The contention is that, just as a post-9/11 world expedited concerns about globalization, supervision, and security, so too did the world simultaneously shrink, connecting seemingly divergent private lives. Perhaps this shrinkage also lessened the distance between the conceptions of public and private, condensing the two. Life cannot be evenly squared into either sphere, which Amira and Mel learn through harrowing experiences toying with the meaning of assimilation. The muddying of domesticity and personal identity through the lens of American political power feels just as highly relevant today, as the nation grapples with how a deeply personal decision, reproduction, has been politicized in our contemporary moment.
Planes
By Peter C. Baker
245 pages, Alfred A. Knopf Publishing Group.
About the Author
Evie (Evangeline) Lopoo is a social science researcher, criminal justice advocate, and writer. She is a Project Manager for the Square One Project, housed at the Columbia University Justice Lab, in which capacity she works on international justice efforts and racial justice educational curricula. She is also working on a book manuscript about the history and current manifestations of probation and parole in the United States correctional system. You can find her policy publications at https://justicelab.columbia.edu/ and https://squareonejustice.org/ and her random thoughts at @EvieLopoo on Twitter. Evie is based in New York City.
